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Forget the bright yellow grocery store bananas (Musa spp.). You can enjoy the rich flavor of your own homegrown bananas if you live in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 9 through 11. These areas are best for bananas because they experience few times when temperatures dip below freezing over the winter. This is important to ensure your banana plant yields fruit because the plant must survive the winter if you want to harvest bananas from it. The time it takes before you can enjoy your own bananas will depend on a variety of factors, including temperatures, shade and drought.

Time to Fruiting

If you have a banana plant, you must have 10 to 15 months of growing for the plant to produce fruit. The exact time the plant takes to fruit will depend on various environmental conditions. If you give the plant prime conditions, it will likely produce fruit for you.

Cold

Cold weather prevents people in chillier regions of the country from growing bananas. The entire growing period must remain frost-free for the banana plant to produce fruit. Cold weather below 50 degrees Fahrenheit will cause the plant to stop growing, but even slightly warmer temperatures than this can cause harm to the plant. From 60 F to freezing, a banana plant may experience chilling injury, which could include a failure of the fruiting portion of the plant to emerge.

Shade

As tropical plants, bananas prefer full sun, but you can grow them in places up to 50 percent shade, notes University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Growing banana plants in partial shade is not recommended because not enough sun may lengthen the time it takes before the banana plant produces fruit.

Drought

Drought conditions are hard on banana plants. Extreme drought may keep the fruit from appearing on the plant, a condition known as choking. Especially during dry whether, it is important to keep watering your banana plant regularly.

Harvest

The banana harvest occurs once the fruiting stalk appears and has matured for three to four months. You can harvest the bananas by cutting off the entire stalk full of plump, green bananas. They should be ripened in a cool, dark place until the bananas turn yellow.